Keith Gerein: It's time for the UCP to show its cards on climate changeBack to video

Unfortunately, up until this point, the debate has had only one perspective to chew on.

The NDP has put its cards on the table and pushed all its chips into the middle with its Climate Leadership Plan. Job killer or job creator, carbon reducer or merely a wallet reducer, Albertans have been living with the tax for the past two years.

The UCP has been regularly happy to rip into the scheme as a reckless gamble, yet Jason Kenney’s party has not revealed much about its own plans to tackle climate change.

Kenney actually showed one card Wednesday when he hinted a UCP government would scrap Energy Efficiency Alberta. But beyond that, Albertans have been largely left to guess how how the UCP would implement real action on the environment in a way that doesn’t hit Albertans in the pocketbook.

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The same is true of the federal Conservatives.

Voters have waited long enough and it’s time those Conservative leaders showed us their hand. The problem is that they have been keeping their cards so close to the chest for so long, it’s beginning to smell like a bluff.

That’s not to say there aren’t some very legitimate questions still hanging around the NDP’s plan, including how well the program is living up to its lofty promises.

Is it reducing emissions? Is it creating jobs? Are communities benefitting? Is it changing Albertans’ behaviour to reduce their carbon footprint?

Comprehensive answers remain hard to come by, in part because the sample size is simply too small.

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Plans of this nature are best viewed over the long term, a perspective that doesn’t fit into schedules built around election cycles. The NDP has asked Albertans to take on faith that the payoff will come if only the plan is allowed to play out, which is more than a simple request in difficult economic times.

Their investigation to track how $1.8 billion in carbon tax revenue has been spent revealed an important trend: Despite the grumbling, there has been a hearty response across the province from individuals, businesses, Indigenous reserves and other communities to take advantage of the benefit programs it supports.

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It’s also not just LRT funding, but includes grants to subsidize solar panels on recreation facilities, install energy-efficient lights, retrofit municipal buildings, and conduct energy audits that could lead to more improvements down the road.

To me, this is good policy for communities to both lower emissions and eventually achieve energy savings that could be reinvested in other programs.

My colleagues’ work to shine an LED-powered spotlight on this trend was necessary, unfortunately, because the NDP government has done a lousy job of explaining its own product. The governing party has become so caught up in the superficial, daily back-and-forth with the UCP that it has neglected to provide a clear picture of the work that’s actually being done, at both a broad and community level.

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More effort is needed to show the people of Barrhead, for example, that the carbon tax they pay helped install solar panels on the aquatics centre. Or to remind the people of Drumheller that they have contributed to the lighting retrofit at the local arena.

Taxes of any form are always going to be controversial, but it’s clear to me that the programs supported by Alberta’s carbon levy have generated enough interest and value that it would be a shame to scrap them entirely.

Whether a UCP government would do this is still unclear.

But since the party has made killing the consumer tax its top priority, it’s easy to suspect its programs would also be on the chopping block. That is, unless the UCP is willing to find another source of money.

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Thus far, the UCP’s focus has been on expressing the plight of individuals and businesses who feel the tax has added to Albertans’ financial distress. That’s an important perspective, but the party is overdue in taking the next step.

If Kenney is sincere in his vow to address climate change, then he owes it to Albertans to give them plenty of time to see how he plans to do that, rather than waiting until the closing moments of the campaign.

However you feel about the issue, Albertans can’t have a proper debate until the party leading the polls puts more on the table besides complaints.

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